The King's Daughter (21 page)

The Clink. There had been a prison in the stone palace of the bishops of Winchester on the south bank of London since the twelfth century, and its evocative name had come to stand for all prisons in England.

Isabel and Carlos arrived at the riverside palace gate after a morning’s ride from Essex made tortuous by the necessity of taking secondary roads to avoid possible search parties, and by a piercing wind that had risen around noon. They tethered the mare and walked in among the visitors and the traders in food and fuel: farmers on donkeys, vintners and firewood vendors in ox carts, water carriers and market women on foot. The inner quadrangle of the palace was alive with commerce, and Isabel found its orderly bustle a respite after the struggle she and the mercenary had just made through Southwark where the noisome, narrow streets were crowded with the squabbling customers of the brothels, inns, and bear gardens for which the south bank was famous. The savagery of the bear gardens still seemed near, though, as the bear-baiting mastiffs’ barking from the kennels leapt over the lead roofs of the palace in the still air.

Isabel looked up. If her father was in this prison, could she somehow manage to get him scrambling over those same roofs and escape to safety? Was it a mad hope? Her quest to even
find
him in the teeming city of London with this grim-faced, silent mercenary seemed slightly mad. So be it, she told herself. She could accept the madness—had she any choice?—if only the quest was not hopeless.

The Clink was in the palace cellar, beneath the bishop’s great hall. Beyond the prison’s iron-studded door an elderly porter got up from his desk and asked Isabel for four pence, the fee charged any member of the public seeking entrance. Isabel gave it to him, along with her father’s name.

“Debtor or felon?” the porter asked, opening an admissions book to a grubby page.

Isabel swallowed. “Felon,” she said. “Is he here?”

The porter studied her with sudden sharp scrutiny and looked askance at the mercenary. “Can’t say.”

“But your ledger—”

“Ledger’s for visitors’ fees.” Abruptly, he called out, “Cellarman!”

A man with bushy black hair rose yawning from a stool and ambled toward them.

“Felons’ ward,” the porter instructed him.

The man nodded. “Tuppence,” he said, holding out his grimy hand to Isabel.

“But I just paid the porter.”

The porter sighed, and explained in the tone of a recitation, “No one goes among the felons unescorted. The fee for the escort is tuppence. Pay the cellarman or leave.”

Isabel paid. The porter turned back to enter the transaction in his ledger. As the cellarman pocketed the coins he eyed Isabel in a way so similar to Mosse’s leering that it made her skin crawl. He said quietly to her, “You can leave your man here.”

“No, I go with her,” the mercenary said.

The cellarman looked startled by this unequivocal statement from a servant, but he shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, and turned to lead the way. Isabel stole a glance at the mercenary, truly glad of his presence for the first time.

The cellarman led them through the porter’s lodge, then down a flight of dimly lit stone steps. He unlocked a door and took them into a low, stone-vaulted corridor where male prisoners were strolling. There were many other visitors, too. Isabel was not surprised. All prisons were open to anyone who wanted to conduct business with the inmates, or to drink and sport with them, or merely to gape. Prisoners lounged against the walls, eyeing the new arrivals as they passed.

The mercenary came up close behind Isabel and said in her ear, “Hide your money.”

Isabel quickly untied her purse from her waist and shoved it deep inside her wide sleeve. Yet she did not feel afraid of the prisoners. Though most looked sullen and shabby, they did not appear vicious.

“Debtors,” the cellarman said, as if responding to her thoughts. He sidestepped a mound of dog feces.

They turned a corner. The passage became darker; the only light came from the odd, sputtering cresset lamp. Mildew spotted the stone walls. They passed into a dank-smelling room. Isabel drew in a sudden, shocked breath. Men were pinned inside wooden stocks along both sides of the room. Their hands and naked feet protruded from holes in the stocks. Several of them lay slumped over the top, asleep or unconscious. One, sitting bolt upright, was weeping. A well-dressed young couple stood staring at him in morbid fascination. A sad-faced woman kneeled beside a prisoner at the far end and washed his feet with a rag.

“Suspect heretics,” the cellarman said, not looking right or left as he led the way through the room. They came out into a wider space, a dining hall. At long tables visitors sat with prisoners—male and female—eating, drinking, playing cards, tossing dice.

Isabel heard more female voices further down another corridor. The cellarman led them that way and the sounds became louder: chatter, laughter, jeers. Finally they came to its source: a women’s ward, though several men were lounging there as well. The room was crowded and very noisy. Straw pallets lay scattered around the floor. A baby bawled in a corner. A chicken flapped frantically as three women tried to catch it. A bare-bottomed little boy waddled past Isabel. The women prisoners wore gaudy, threadbare gowns on their wasted bodies, and garish paint on their lips andcheeks. Two of them whistled at the mercenary. One called out to him a suggestion so lewd that Isabel could not help glancing at him in astonishment. He stared ahead, ignoring the catcalls.

“Winchester geese,” the cellarman said over his shoulder to Isabel.

“Pardon?”

“Whores.”

Isabel blushed. “Oh.”

They passed out of the women’s ward, though no barrier separated it from the corridor to keep the other wards’ inmates from mingling. “What’d you say the felon’s name was?” the cellarman asked as they walked on.

“Richard Thornleigh,” Isabel said.

The man looked around at her, brightening. “I know him. Brought in yesterday, he was. Older bloke, right? Kind of quiet?”

Isabel’s eyes widened in amazement. What luck! Of all the prisons in London she had chosen the Clink first only because, of the three in Southwark, it was the first one across London Bridge. “That’s right,” she said, eagerly. “Can you take me to him?”

“Aye.”

Isabel clamped down her excitement.

They arrived at a barred door. The cellarman unhooked a wooden truncheon that hung at his waist. “Thieves and murderers,” he said darkly, and knocked on the door. It was opened by his counterpart. Isabel stepped into a large, dim ward. She immediately began rationing breaths in the foul air. The cellarman slapped the end of his truncheon against the flat of his hand as if preparing himself.

Some of the prisoners sat on the packed earth floor, their wrists chained to the walls. Others, unfettered, lay on matted mounds of filthy straw. A few were walking aimlessly, a few were sleeping. A cluster of them squatted on the floor by a pillar, gambling. There were some women too—apparently, by their dress, prostitutes from the women’s ward. Male and female faces looked around with malevolent stares at the visitors. Another cellarman idly patrolled the ward, truncheon in hand. Isabel saw that the door she had come through was the only exit.

She felt a sudden wave of panic. It would be impossible to get her father out of here! She looked at the mercenary. He was scanning the ward with his usual intense, determined look. His resolution calmed Isabel a little. He knew what he was doing.

“Where is he?” she whispered to the cellarman.

“Over there.” He nodded toward a tall, gray-haired man among the gamblers. His back was turned. The mercenary immediately started toward him and Isabel followed, her heart quickening with every step. The cellarman came, too. When they reached the gamblers the cellarman clapped a hand on the gray-haired man’s shoulder and said, “Thornleigh. Visitor for you.”

The man cackled. Isabel felt a stone sink to the pit of her stomach. She knew, even before he turned—a wild-eyed stranger—that it had been too good to be true.

They were halfway across London Bridge, the mercenary on foot, leading the mare.

“Stop,” Isabel said from the mare’s back. The mercenary glanced around with a frown but kept walking.

“Stop, I say!” She jumped down off the mare. Foot traffic and horse traffic flowed around them. She felt trapped. With a lurch of panic she pushed through to the side of the bridge.

She reached a gap between the three-storied shops and looked out over the gray, wind-whipped Thames. She took several deep breaths of the cold air, but it did nothing to ease her anxiety. They had just left the Clink, and the mercenary had declared it was too late in the day to search another prison: all prisons turned out the public before dusk in preparation for locking up for the night. They should go to an inn, he said, and wait for morning. But Isabel found thedecision a torture. To have come all the way to London only to find such heartbreak at the Clink. And now, to have to wait … when an assassin hired by the Grenvilles might be stalking her father in some verminous ward at this very moment. It was unbearable….

She looked out at the water. The river was crowded with barges and ferries, and the watermen’s whistles shrilled above passengers’ shouts from various wharf stairs of “Oars!” and “Westward, ho!” A drayman near the German merchants’ wharf was dumping a cartload of refuse into the water. Isabel watched a goat carcass float toward the bridge. In summer, she thought, there would be swans here. Scores of swans forming downy white clouds on the water. The memory pierced her—the summer sweetness of it—like a shard of a poignant dream impossible to hold on to.

She hardly knew which distress weighed her down most heavily. The thought of her fevered mother possibly dying onboard the ship was too horrible to contemplate, so she didn’t; her mother
must
recover. But the other bonds that held her life together—her father and Martin—were equally threatened, and their claims to her loyalty warred inside her. She was pledged to take Wyatt information about the French Ambassador’s support, information that might be essential to the cause, and to Martin’s very life. Yet the search for her father was keeping her from doing so. But could she leave her father to his fate? Impossible! She glanced toward the city, where Ambassador de Noailles was, then looked anxiously back toward Southwark. The Marshalsea prison was there, and King’s Bench prison, too. Was her father chained in one of them?

The mercenary came beside her, the horse’s reins in his hand. She turned to him. “Could we not manage a look into the Marshalsea?” she entreated.

He shook his head, then nodded toward the horizon. She looked at the sun dipping toward the Westminster reach of the river. Of course, it was too late. She must wait until tomorrow.

Behind her, a girl was loudly hawking eels and spiced meat pies to passersby. A trio of horsemen trotted down the bridge’s center. An oxcart joggled by.

“I despair of finding my father at all,” Isabel said softly.

The mercenary turned, putting the river scene behind him. “The turnkey said there are seven prisons,” he said, adjusting the bridle on the horse’s nose. “Thornleigh is in one of them. If we keep looking, we will find him.”

“But … will you really be able to rescue him?”

He did not look at her. He
never
looked at her. “There are ways,” he said.

His coolness was a goad to her grief, and she lashed out. “I recently watched a madman shoot my mother. She may die. I will not let them kill my father, too. Surely even
you
can you sympathize with that. Or perhaps you did not know who your father was.”

His gray eyes suddenly fixed her with what felt like contempt. “No. My mother was a camp whore.”

Isabel was shocked. Not so much by the fact as by his indifferent acceptance of it, his total lack of shame. She felt instantly contrite, knowing that, for her unprovoked insult,
she
was the one who should feel shame.

He glanced toward the bridge’s gateway that led to the city. He moved to the horse’s side and jerked the stirrup toward Isabel. “Get up,” he said roughly.

Isabel held her tongue. She mounted the horse.

The Anchor, where Isabel decided they would stay, was a small inn on cobbled Thames Street. It was snugly tucked away, with its stable and tiny courtyard, between a brewery warehouse on the corner up from Dowgate Dock and the fortress-like enclave of the Hanse merchants, called the Steelyard. Going to the Crane Inn, so comfortable and so full of friends in Master Legge and his family, was now out of the question, since Master Legge believed Isabel was on her way to Antwerp with her mother, as her father had commanded.Nor could she go to Martin’s family. With her father imprisoned for murder, and her traveling companion an escaped felon, her very presence might endanger the St. Legers. She had no wish to do that.

The Anchor was a scene of blithe family chaos. Isabel and Carlos, the inn’s only guests at the moment, sat at a table in the common room. Isabel was halfway through a much-appreciated mug of ale and a saffron bun, and the mercenary, who had downed two mugs already, was busy cleaning his sword. Three of the innkeeper’s young children ran about noisily playing hide and seek, chased by a yapping black-and-tan terrier, the resident ratcatcher. Two older children, a boy and a girl, neither more than ten, sat in a window seat arguing over a basket of kittens whose mother, indulging the small invading human hands, watched them through eyes narrowed in vigilance. The innkeeper’s wife, a woman with rolls of flesh at her waist and under her floured chin, stood at a table pummeling a lump of dough into submission, while the innkeeper himself sat in state in a nook with several of his cronies, examining a gorgeously combed fighting cock. The room was chilly, for the hearth fires, here and in the kitchen, had been dowsed for the ministrations of the chimney sweep who had just been and gone, and the chambermaid, after serving the newcomers their ale, was now busy on her knees at the cold hearth, her head invisible halfway up the chimney and her voice reverberating through it as she invoked curses on the sweep for having left a mess of soot and cinders.